New grant will support Bee coverage of Asian-American communities. How you can be involved.

The Sacramento Bee on Thursday was one of 50 newsrooms awarded a grant from an national service program called Report for America. The grant will help pay for a full-time reporter in our newsroom to cover Californians of Asian descent.

Close to 20 percent of Sacramento’s population and 16 percent of all Californians are of Asian descent.

The reporting will be shared with all five of McClatchy’s California publications.

A reporter on this new beat will offer an understanding of, and exposure to, the political, cultural, societal and economic challenges that affect Chinese, Cambodian, Indian, Hmong and Japanese communities, as well as the contributions each group makes.

How do cultural expectations shape the emerging #MeToo movement and its impact on Asian-American families? How do local laws and ordinances affect immigrant business owners? We can explore these topics and more from the capital of the nation’s most populous state.

As a host newsroom, The Bee will welcome one of RFA’s 2019 corps reporters to join us starting in June. The 2018 corps class had 13 reporters; this year’s corps has 60.

The Modesto Bee and Fresno Bee also received grants to support local reporting.

“We’re thrilled to be among the news organizations included in this program, and we look forward to deeping our relationships with communities across California,” said Sacramento Bee and West Region Editor Lauren Gustus.

RFA assignments last a full year, with the option to renew for a second year. Candidates will be interviewed by The Bee in March before coming aboard in June.

RFA is an initiative started in 2017 as part of The GroundTruth Project, a nonprofit. In addition to recruiting journalists, RFA provides them with development opportunities via training and mentoring before and during their assignments in local newsrooms.

To make this a reality, we need our community’s help.

A major goal of this grant program “is to bring more local philanthropy in to support journalism,” as RFA says on its website. A portion of the reporter’s salary comes from RFA, the rest, we hope, will come from community support and through the nonprofit RFA.

More to come on how you can join us on this reporting journey.

This story was originally published January 17, 2019 at 7:00 AM.